Best Books of 2017

November 12, 2019

Best Books of 2017

Every year on the week before Christmas and New Year’s, I spend time reflecting on the past year. Reviewing the books I’ve read, the goals I set/met, how am I feeling, what am I hopeful for next year. Today, I’ll review what I fed my mind with in 2017. I did quite a bit of historical context reading mixed with gritty topics like vulnerability and belonging. Some books I re-read often because they help me navigate life and fill me with daydreams of the world I want to live in once we get through neutralizing tyranny.

I was deathly scared of politics prior to Nov 9, 2016. Being online leading up to the election was filled with frogs and rabid polarization, reiterating my childhood experiences that politics is emotionally tied to anger, so I purposefully stayed away. I didn’t know how to canvas for a candidate or contact my representative. I assumed we had a pipeline of conscious leaders waiting to run for state or local office. When I went back and looked through the books that had shaped my business knowledge, I realized most were white male conquering stories. Not many females or people of color. Not many business products were catered to women or people of color's needs nor were the companies RUN by women or people of color. I hadn’t thought deeply about where the others were hiding. I believed the promise of upward social mobility of the American dream was possible.

2017 for me was about pushing through that fear of politics. Pushing through my association with anger to understand the historical context of injustices, the mechanics of electoral politics, and the sticky feelings of engaging with others across the political spectrum while being authentic to myself. Learning how our existential crisis of disconnection was wound up through technology and what it would take to heal the divisions. I found comfort in books; grateful to the authors for putting thoughts on paper and sharing stories that need to be told.

I made a 2018 suggested reading list on Amazon to house the books that informed my thinking this year so you can easily look them up. We’ve got a 3 to 7 year window to save democracy. I didn’t know until the 2016 election close we were to tyranny or an oligarchy. (Check out, On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, Yale’s Holocaust historian if you want to know the warning signs of Tyranny.)

Without further ado, here are the titles that shaped my year and what I recommend reading in 2018.

This book is like a bible to me. Brene Brown explains that contrary to myth, vulnerability is not weakness and is deeply connected to how much we engage with life. To be vulnerable is to let ourselves be seen which requires courage and clarity of purpose. Or, we can hurl judgement and advice from the cheap seats. Brene is a shame researcher at the University of Houston in Texas who gave a TEDTalk few years ago that immediately became one of the top 10 most watched. I re-watched the video several times this year when I was searching for humanity in the chaos. Her research around shame has identified love and belonging as primal to humans as food, water, and shelter. I think her work points out how Maslow’s hierarchy is flawed. It’s why we form tribes. It’s how we know if we “fit” at work. Her recommendation to overcome our crisis of disconnection (que: rise of white supremacy) is to re-humanize education and work by understanding how scarcity is affecting the way we lead and work, how to engage with vulnerability, and recognizing and combating shame. I recommend this book wholeheartedly for parents, teachers; anyone that wants to see a kinder and more loving world.

This is Brene Brown’s latest book and her timing this year was a saving grace. I recommend for any leader who has taken up the work of community organizing or leading authentically at work this year, and is preparing for great healing that needs to happen in America. (I define leader the way Brene does: anyone who holds themselves accountable for for finding potential in people and processes). Speaking up and engaging with a world that has gone mad is tough. But, Courage is contagious. Once we understand how true belonging works, that it’s a primal need that drives our desire for fitting in and seeking approval, and how we broke it in America, we can begin the work of healing those wounds. One of the main barriers to true belonging is a spiritual disconnection. Brene defines spirituality in this way.

Spirituality is recognizing that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than us, and that connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion.

All living peacefully while exercising our individuality. Sounds like religious liberty, huh? She offers four elements of true belonging and shows how to make a practice of true belonging that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. This book offers a road map for the great healing that will be required to reconnect Americans.

This book demystifies how to run for office as an everyday person. It covers what you’ll need to do, how to tell your story, and a little motivation to step up into the arena. Amanda’s a millennial and writes in a very understandable voice. Gift this book to inspiring young people in your life who are passionate to tackle big challenges in our future.

Nancy Koehn tells the stories of 5 leaders from different ages across history and connects the commonalities between them. The story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisting Nazi evil confirmed my belief that we are re-living history. The way the Nazi’s spread propaganda, demonized Jews, co-opted the Lutheran church to be a state church, all rings eerily familiar. Dietrich’s writings of how to be a committed Christian in a totalitarian state are something I want to dig more deeply into in 2018.

Rana Foroohar tells the story of our rigged economy so we can clearly see how the wealthy gamed the system by financialization which is threatening the American Dream. She then lays out a way to reverse these trends for a way forward of shared prosperity. Highly recommend this as historical background to the greatest challenge my generation will combat: income inequality.

Richard Reeves' newly released book describes in great detail how public policies around tax-assisted exclusionary zoning, unfairness in college admissions, and the allocation of unpaid internships are all versions of opportunity hoarding. The systemic hoarding of opportunities by the upper middle class is preventing social mobility - the essence of the American dream. His remedy might be unpopular, but the only way out of this is for some of the upper middle class to experience downward mobility. We need tax reform; not the kind passed in 2017 which solidified stratification. There is an expert book coming out soon Fiscal Therapy, that will attempt to address this in more detail. In order to have these difficult conversations with our friends and peers, we’ll have to practice radical vulnerability and empathy, and a stronger resolve in our collective responsibility as American citizens. I highly recommend this book for anyone living in a tourist town such as Bend, to understand how the tax codes intentionally created inequality.

I was shocked to learn last summer that African Americans were forbidden to buy land in Oregon as late as 1969. Many of the segregation laws may be gone, but their effects are living on. Furthermore, we never healed the wounds those policies created and wrongly assumed that the American Dream automatically fix the deep wounds these policies created. There has been a collective awakening across America after the 2016 election. This country was founded on white supremacy and we can no longer ignore our racist past. If we want to see a country that lives up to it’s promise of equality and freedom for all, we must understand how white supremacy has been the rule of law in our lifetime through government policies.

There have been many articles written this year about rural America. Joan Williams’s book was more helpful to me than Hillbilly Elegy in pinpointing the language of disrespect that has made it’s way into mainstream — signaling to rural America that they don’t belong here. This is one of the biggest blind spots I see in my hometown of Bend, Oregon. Many of our local efforts around education have focused on an expensive four year college as the only route to social mobility. I find that assumption short-sided and ignorant of more agile means of educating through workshops or certificates. Joan’s historical look of how working class learned to distrust college as a means to upward mobility and resent the managerial class that is given privileges based on those credentials was eye opening. I wrote about rural America’s backlash on tech last fall before the election. Only 20% of Oregonians have college degrees, yet that is used as a qualifier for every job that offers a living wage income. We are effectively locking out 80% of Oregonians from providing for their family. When I attended my local city council meeting last week, some of the council members were unfamiliar with these statistics and were using dehumanizing language to describe working class people. This book may be a good gift for the Bend City Council in 2018.

I haven’t read this book yet, but it was recommended amongst my tech peers as a good primer to understanding how Big Data / AI will further expand the income inequality problem that threatens democracy today. We must be more conscious in the tech industry with a greater collective responsibility to America and correct the biases these technologies inherently possess. Facebook (well, all social media) radicalized ideologies and is (are) running away from accountability. Going forward, we must create stronger guardrails (policies) that will protect the republic from being compromised in the pursuit of material wealth.

This book should be required curriculum for every grade school. If every human focused on mastering their own emotions and nurturing their own gifts/potential — we could solve the immediate challenges our humanity faces rather than preparing kids to make more money for the upper middle class (who are clearly hoarding resources for themselves). America could return to the beacon of hope and collective responsibility for the world. In this book, Brene describes how cultivating daily practices of courage, compassion and connection enable us to engage with this world from a place of worthiness. Remember, courage is contageous. We NEED courageous leaders right now — of all ages. Truly courageous leaders defined by their actions, not their titles.

This one is a free PDF published by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I stumbled on ILSR during the #netneutrality FEC vote. They’ve been educating cities on how to implement community-owned broadband, which Sandy, Oregon has been a success story from 2015. ILSR also publish resources to help cities become self-reliant through energy independent, banking, waste. Check ’em out. They also have an iformative podcast Building Local Power with primers on all these topics.

This book gave me hope early in 2018 and set in my mind on the public policy necessities for America once we neutralize the threat of tyranny. If we honestly prioritize family values, we will make it easier for everyone to spend time with their family. That means prioritizing the first year of life, reduce the barriers to social mobility, and securing financial futures for young and old. This looks like national paid leave, quality affordable neighborhood pre-K, minimal cost vocational training, municipal broadband across rural and urban areas, medicare for all, and nationally available retirement savings plans not tied to an employer. These programs would build our collective responsibility to each other and to this world. We only have one planet, that we are all citizens of. If America wants to return to being a leader, we must act like one first.

Who are the immensely wealthy ideologues shaping American discourse today? Jane Myer unrolls who has bankrolled a systemic plan to fundamentally alter America's political system. By hiding the origination of these funds, they have shielded themselves from public scrutiny. Myer draws from hundreds of interviews, private papers and court proceedings to connect the dots behind this mysterious network.

These were the books that shaped my mind in 2017. What were the books that shaped yours?